LETTER: Hobby Lobby ruling sets dangerous precedent

The Hobby Lobby majority opinion issued by the U.S. Supreme Court has set a new precedent in hypocrisy.

In 1990, Justice Antonin Scalia said in a similar case that if he allowed American Indians to break the law by using peyote as part of a religious ceremony, all other religions would try to get exceptions. Religious belief, no matter how pious, cannot trump law.

Scalia wrote that permitting exceptions “would open the prospect of constitutionally required exemptions from civic obligations of almost every conceivable kind.” Scalia cited as examples compulsory military service, payment of taxes, vaccination requirements, and child-neglect laws.

Your right to celebrate your own religion has been seriously compromised by the decision in the Hobby Lobby case. If your boss can stop you from using birth control (and for the vast majority of people, the employer’s purse strings do control what you can and cannot afford), then where does it stop?

Can this same boss now claim that gays offend his religion and not hire them? Can he say that Jews offend him and threaten to fire them if they don’t convert to his religion?

The floodgates have been opened. Your employer’s religion trumps yours.

Hope you don’t need your job so badly that you can’t afford to quit, because your employer now controls what medical care you can have, who you can sleep with and maybe even what religion you can practice.